The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (8 page)

“I think religion is important,” he answered.

“But?”

“But I’m to be a congressman, a politician; not a preacher.”

“So what?”

“Well, they have separate roles, grandma,” Lamar said. “They should operate in separate spheres and see to very different needs of the people. I don’t think they should be mixed.”

“The Reverend Martin Luther King would have disagreed with you, son,” she said. “Your grandfather, God rest his soul, would have disagreed with you too. He was also a preacher who meddled in politics. And all those fire and brimstone, bible-thumping abolitionists who crusaded for an end to slavery, they would have disagreed with you too. Personally, I thank God those men and women didn’t think twice about mixing religion and politics. The country is a better, freer place for all their bible-thumping.”

“I certainly don’t want to take anything away from them,” he told her. “I’m as grateful as the next black man for their struggle, for your struggle and especially for grandpa’s sacrifice. I really am and I know that I can’t, that my generation can’t ever repay the debt we owe. It’s just that I can’t help but believe that religion, your religion and grandpa’s religion and the religion of all those wonderful people who struggled and fought for the freedom of their fellows was, well…
is
incidental.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

“I mean that good is good in and of its self and people today, good people today realize that,” Lamar explained. “In today’s world good people will do good things without any prompting from organized religion. There is no shortage of neighbor loving atheists in the world gran mama.”

“No there ain’t,” she conceded. “But the good they do, the good they and you recognize as good has come to you through religion.”

“Perhaps,” Lamar agreed. “Perhaps it was religion that transmitted the ideas of brotherhood, love and service through the ages but; those ideas, in this age of ours, are recognized as good in themselves, worthy of pursuing for their own sakes and not in the hope of an eternal, otherworldly reward. Those ideals can stand on their own legs today. We can treat each other as brothers and sisters today without believing that there is a God out there that demands it of us.”

His grandmother laughed at that. “Don’t be so sure. After all, we never practiced it too good while we still believed there was a God who commanded it. And you can sing all the hymns and praises you like for this great, modern and enlightened age of yours; but I don’t, not for a blessed minute, think separating religion from politics is going to make us anymore tolerant, kind or
any more
neighbor-loving
. The further behind we’ve left religion the worse, the more hateful people have gotten. Life is becoming cheaper by the day. There’s no government program that’s going to turn that around.”

“You surprise me gran mama,” Lamar said. “I thought the thing about being a Christian is having faith.”

Lamar remembers the smile that lit up her face. He closes his eyes, feels them tearing up behind the lids as he is transported back to that evening at her home.

“The
thing
, as you put it, about an old Christian like me,” she said, her gray eyes fixed firmly on his own. “A Christian who has seen as much of this devil’s world as I have puts her faith in God and not in kings and princes and all their high-horsed plans.”

“What about young, bright, idealistic, handsome and newly elected congressmen? Have you got any faith for the likes of us?”

She giggled softly, almost girlishly. She put a hand to his face, stroked his cheek and pinched his earlobe. “I have a little faith that I can send your way.”

Lamar grinned. He took her small hands in his and kissed both of her palms. “That’ll do. I’ve heard a little is all you need to move mountains.”

“Truer words have never been uttered,” she said and then looked away at the flat screen television hung over the mantle of her living room. The set was off, its screen dark, but she stared into it as if she was seeing something other than the dull reflection of them sitting on her sofa. Her smile disappeared, the arc of her lips slowly relaxing until the mouth set into a stern, straight line.

She clasped her hands around his. “Lamar, my child, I know you had nothing to do with that dreadful business in California tonight. But pretty soon you are going to be part of this government. You will share responsibility before God for what it does, for everything it does.”

Lamar hesitated, not knowing what to say to her.

“You do believe in God, don’t you Lamar?”

“I don’t, gran mama. I’m sorry, but I just don’t.”

“You used to believe, son. What happened?”

“I guess it began with dad’s death,” he said. “It was so senseless, so pointless and random. It made no sense to me, none whatsoever. Even the preacher at the funeral said pretty much the same thing. I remember him quoting the book of Job, advising us that at such times we must remember that the Lord’s ways
were not our ways, and we could not hope to make sense of why tragedies befell good people. All we could do was have faith that God would, in His ineffable way, in some indeterminate future, turn the evil into good. I remember thinking at the time, that’s just not good enough.”

“You were understandably angry,” she said.

Lamar nodded. “I was. The anger has since passed, but not the feeling that religion is just a crutch, a coping mechanism for loss. And that may be fine for some people. It’s just not enough for me. Not anymore.”

His grandmother smiled sadly or wisely or maybe both at once. He remembered it differently at various times. “You’re right about that my son. Religion is a coping mechanism for loss, especially the loss that is death, whether it is another’s or our own death. But if you think that is all it is, you’re shortchanging both religion and yourself. Religion is also the means through which man speaks with God.”

“Well then, God should talk back to us from time to time,” Lamar quipped.

“He is always talking to those who have the faith to hear him.”

“It comes down in the end, I guess, to whether one has the faith that believes in a God,” Lamar said. “I’m afraid I have lost mine.”

“I understand all about loss of faith,” his grandmother said, giving his hands a squeeze. “When I saw what was done to your grandfather, my faith flew from me with my rage and it bled from me with my tears. When I saw my husband, my good man lowered into a grave while he was still so young, while he was still so beautiful and so filled with love, my faith died. It was buried with him. It was a long time before it came back to me.”

“When did it come back?” Lamar asked. “How did it come back to you?”

“You’ll think me a silly, old woman if I tell you.”

“I would never think anything of the sort about you.”

“When you were born,” she answered. “When you first opened your eyes and looked at me as an infant. I saw Zeke in you, smiling up at me from your mother’s arms as surely as I felt him smiling down on me. And just like that, I believed again in a God whose ways are not our ways and whose mysteries I might never understand but trusted nonetheless.”

“Well, maybe one day I’ll find my way back to faith,” Lamar offered.

“You will,” she said. “I believe. I have faith in you, like I said.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she grinned. “But that don’t mean you’re off the hook with Reverend Randolph. Just because you’re an elected congressman with separate duties and such than a preacher’s don’t mean you got to stop going to church. If anything, it’s more of a reason to go.”

“Even if I don’t believe in God?”

“Especially if you don’t believe in God!”

“Okay,” Lamar conceded. “I’ll go see Randolph on Sunday.”

And Lamar Reed did go see Reverend Randolph’s services every Sunday until he moved to Washington two months later. Once in DC, his grandmother sent him a list of churches she thought he might enjoy. He promised to check them out once he got settled into his new job. He never did. She died in her sleep a few weeks after he took his oath. Her funeral was the last service he attended.

Yes, Reed knows it in his bones, his grandmother, if she was still alive, would be out there in the streets, walker and all, braving the cold and the government’s threats with the other quarter of a million Christians. He was not out there though. There were two senators and half a dozen fellow congressmen who joined the protestors. They were out there with them right now but he was not. Congressman Lamar Reed, grandson of martyred Baptist minister, Ezekiel Beaumont; he was not standing with the crowds in the National Mall. He was having drinks in a bar on the other end of town.

A small but insistent sense of guilt gnaws at him as he watches the huddled and praying masses. He supposes it is only natural. He was raised a Baptist, a Christian after all, and he could not deny that his grandmother’s religion contributed greatly to his making. He even shared her faith once, though it had since sloughed off, gradually and imperceptibly, like an old skin. He didn’t miss it, he told himself, because he had kept the heart of it, the important part. The values of love and service to his fellow man remained intact with him. Everything else about religion had come to seem like so much theatre to Lamar, the product of man’s need to ritualize his behavior and mythologize his experience.

The helicopter taking the aerial shot of the crowds zooms in on the snipers scattered around the many rooftops. They are part of the twenty-five thousand National Guard troops called in to keep the peace. So far they hadn’t had much to do, but patrol the streets and keep the protestors and the counter demonstrators separated. The President is expected to address them and the nation at 7
p.m. O’Neill will make his plea to keep the peace in less than half an hour. The congressman is eager to hear it. Not many people believe that anything will come of it. The media is expecting a deadlier riot than befell the ill-fated Tea Party demonstrators nine years ago. Lamar shudders to think that, had any of his family been out there with the crowds, one of those snipers on television could have been setting his sights on them.

The guilt bites deeper into him.

Reed stirs the last three, thin ice cubes in his glass, lamenting silently the state of affairs which has befallen his country. He recognizes the dark mood slowly eclipsing the light of his usual sunny resolve. It is the same doom-ridden fatalism that grips so much of the world. Never did so many people believe they lived, if not in the end of days, than on the precipice of another dark age. The twenty-first century, many felt, would be civilization’s last century, maybe even mankind’s last. There seemed little cause to discount those fears. And indeed, there were many who not only fervently hoped for one Armageddon or another, but diligently worked to bring doomsday down on everyone’s head.

The aerial shot sweeps across the north lawn of the White House and pans to Lafayette Square to an encampment of such doom-seeking nihilists. They call themselves
Maxists,
and like anarchists before them they seek to bring down ‘the system.’ Only it is no longer merely capitalism or the corporations or the nation-states they take aim at. The Maxists are out to destroy human civilization itself. Toward that end they practice what they called ‘cultural terrorism and moral mayhem.’ They flash-mob museums and churches, take box cutters, axes and spray paint to works of art, set fires in libraries, vandalized property, public and private, they ‘liberate’ zoo animals and incite riots every chance they can. The less brazen limit their assault on civilization by openly defying the norms of decorum. Defecating and sex in public are their favorite forms of protest. Anything that shocks sensibilities or challenges cherished mores is game. They all live off the dole and, in every imaginable way, try to be as much of a drain on society as possible in the hopes of hastening its collapse. ‘Max the system out!’ is their motto and war cry. The more rabid of them, see humanity as a plague on the planet. Bringing down human civilization is not enough for them. They want nothing less than the extinction of the species.

The news show turns back to their studio. A new pair of talking heads square off across the anchor’s desk.

“God help us,” the atheist congressman says to himself.

23:19:21

President William Jennings O’Neill is looking forward to catching a little shut eye on his flight home to Ohio. It has been a long day of meetings with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, various and sundry experts, advisors and journalists. The next five days will be a welcome respite from the White House grind. He knows of course that he can be summoned back at a moment’s notice if any of the dozen or so situations unfolding worldwide suddenly turns catastrophic. He hopes not. He and his staff need the rest before they add the stress of managing a reelection campaign to the trials of running the free world. And mostly, he is really looking forward to his wife’s roasted lamb dinner with the extended family tomorrow. The White House’s four-star chef is a good one, but he can’t hold a spatula to his wife of twenty-seven years.

The President is in the Oval Office preparing to address the nation. A middle-aged black woman with plaited hair dabs a small sponge in a jar of foundation and rubs the make-up into the creases around his eyes and mouth. Nothing short of a face-to-face with the Almighty ages a man as quickly as the Presidency of the United States. New wrinkles and the retreating line of thinning and graying hair on his broad head tell the tale. O’Neill knew it going into the job. One had to be a little crazy, he muses, to even want the gig in the first place. The Office piled responsibility atop responsibility ceaselessly, every hour of every day. He cannot remember the last night of unencumbered sleep that he has been able to enjoy. The world always intrudes into his dreams. Yes, he tells himself, the presidency is certainly taking its toll on him as it did to all who sat in its chair. It has robbed him of his boyish good looks to all but his adoring wife. As the makeup lady rubs foundation into his skin in soft, gentle circles, the President of the United States of America rounds the globe in his mind, visiting all the hot spots that sap him of sleep and serenity.